Spam is unsolicited commercial email, sent out by the million, crowding your mailbox with once-in-a-lifetime offers, free porn, laser printer toner and lots more.
Wouldn't it be nice if you had a secretary who read through your email, and sorted it into two piles - "probably spam" and "probably not spam". Well, that's what I'm aiming to do here.
For this purpose, I'm using what I want as the guideline. I don't want natural alternatives to Viagra, I don't want emails written in Chinese that I can't even read, I don't want emails that were also sent to 20 other people. Or even to ten other people.
If you create a folder called "spam", then the de-spammer puts everything it thinks is spam into there. I'm aiming for that to be at least 99% correct when it says that something is spam. It will still deliver some spam to your INBOX, but that will be a lot less than without the despammer.
If you want to disable the spammer, delete that folder.
The way I use it, is I read my normal inbox first. Then, if I have the time, I read the spam box.
Do what I did. Read some of the spam. You'll see that there's stuff that a great many of them have in common.
| What they say | What it means |
| This is not spam | Oh yes it is |
| to be taken off our lists | To be sent lots more spam |
| received this email in error | Error? Yeah, right. |
| Cable descrambler ... laser printer toner ... Viagra | No thanks |
If it wasn't sent to your email address specifically (for example, send to "undisclosed recipients").
If it was also sent to ten other people. Maybe you want to get all the jokes and other chain letters your friends send you; I don't, thanks very much.
Spammers add a sequence of random characters to the subject line. This is to fool de-spammers that would see a lot of emails with an identical subject, and start to reject them. But you would soon learn that an email with some random sequence in the subject is spam. So, they put in a lot of spaces so that the random letters are far to the right, and don't show up in your mail reader. So, if I find a lot of spaces in a subject line, that's spam.
Spammers say things like "this is not spam". People who aren't sending spam don't way that. Spammers say a lot of other things, like "to remove from future mailings ...". Of course, if you do what they say, they know that someone is actually reading at that email address, and they'll sell you to a million other spammers. But for a despammer, it's another indication that the email is spam.
If you have any questions, or technical problems, you can reach me at mailadmin@stonecoldmail.com
Now - go and read your email